By plying Gambara, meanwhile, with fresh libations, Andrea thus strove, by his contradictoriness, to bring the musician back to a true sense of music, by proving to him that his so-called mission was not to try to regenerate an art beyond his powers, but to seek to express himself in another form; namely, that of poetry.

“But, my dear Count, you have understood nothing of that stupendous musical drama,” said Gambara, airily, as standing in front of Andrea’s piano he struck the keys, listened to the tone, and then seated himself, meditating for a few minutes as if to collect his ideas.

“To begin with, you must know,” said he, “that an ear as practised as mine at once detected that labor of choice and setting of which you spoke.  Yes, the music has been selected, lovingly, from the storehouse of a rich and fertile imagination wherein learning has squeezed every idea to extract the very essence of music.  I will illustrate the process.”

He rose to carry the candles into the adjoining room, and before sitting down again he drank a full glass of Giro, a Sardinian wine, as full of fire as the old wines of Tokay can inspire.

“Now, you see,” said Gambara, “this music is not written for misbelievers, nor for those who know not love.  If you have never suffered from the virulent attacks of an evil spirit who shifts your object just as you are taking aim, who puts a fatal end to your highest hopes,—­in one word, if you have never felt the devil’s tail whisking over the world, the opera of Robert le Diable must be to you, what the Apocalypse is to those who believe that all things will end with them.  But if, persecuted and wretched, you understand that Spirit of Evil,—­the monstrous ape who is perpetually employed in destroying the work of God,—­if you can conceive of him as having, not indeed loved, but ravished, an almost divine woman, and achieved through her the joy of paternity; as so loving his son that he would rather have him eternally miserable with himself than think of him as eternally happy with God; if, finally, you can imagine the mother’s soul for ever hovering over the child’s head to snatch it from the atrocious temptations offered by its father,—­even then you will have but a faint idea of this stupendous drama, which needs but little to make it worthy of comparison with Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni is in its perfection the greater, I grant; Robert le Diable expresses ideas, Don Giovanni arouses sensations. Don Giovanni is as yet the only musical work in which harmony and melody are combined in exactly the right proportions.  In this lies its only superiority, for Robert is the richer work.  But how vain are such comparisons since each is so beautiful in its own way!

“To me, suffering as I do from the demon’s repeated shocks, Robert spoke with greater power than to you; it struck me as being at the same time vast and concentrated.